Makes sense, right? At least, when I say it that way it seems pretty obvious. You probably had some inkling in your mind of the idea that “complex behavior can arise from simple sets of rules” even before I mentioned it to you — didn’t you?

Well, strangely enough, Stephen Wolfram — although a mathematical prodigy who published his first scientific paper at 15, went on to school at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech, and invented the mathematical computation software Mathematica, among other things — did not. When he stumbled upon this idea back in the 1980s (simple rules could produce complexity), he found it not only surprising, but incredible. Astounding. MIND-BOGGLING. So much so that he decided to withdraw from academia, or indeed much of public life, and devote the next 20 years of his life and at least 1,200 pages of text to precisely this phenomenon.

The culmination of this labor is A New Kind of Science, a doorstop of a book that Wolfram claims revolutionizes all forms of scientific research and indeed every kind of human endeavor, from art, to philosophy, to the Meaning of Life itself. I kid you not. And I’ll grant you the favor that Wolfram cannot and allow you to jump off here, if you wish, by giving you my own summary:

This book is complete and utter bullshit.

It’s not so much the information that Wolfram presents that’s the problem. Most of the book is devoted to discussion of cellular automata, a particular kind of computer program the behavior of which my Go example gives only a poor analogy. Wolfram did indeed do some pioneering work with cellular automata in the 1980s, and he knows whereof he speaks.

No, the problem is threefold: A.) Much of what Wolfram presents in this text is not actually new, and much of it was developed by others than Wolfram himself (and he seldom gives credit where it’s due); B.) Wolfram insists that his computational methods are so significant and important that they effectively brush aside all previous scientific methods and indeed mathematics, which Wolfram dismisses as inadequate (despite thousands of years of historical success with those methods); and C.) He makes all these claims with such a pompous, self-congratulatory air that his text is almost impossible to read. (And here I admit that I could not finish it; reading turned to skimming; skimming turned to flipping pages; flipping pages turned to throwing the book down in disgust.)

Take, for example, this passage from chapter 3, which hopes to explain how Wolfram (and Wolfram alone) was able to arrive at the incredible “discoveries” laid on in that chapter: “…one of the problems with very direct experiments is that they often generate huge amounts of raw data. Yet what I have typically found is that if one manages to present this data in the form of pictures then it effectively becomes possibly to analyze very quickly just with one’s eyes. And indeed, in my experience it is typically much easier to recognize unexpected phenomena in this way than by using any kind of automated procedure of data analysis.”

Just on the face of it this paragraph seems intellectually dishonest. Wolfram’s brilliant technique is to “present this data in the form of pictures”? What… you mean like graphs? Anyone who’s made it past elementary algebra without seeing the graph of an equation must be blind.

What Wolfram is in effect proposing, however, actually goes beyond simple graphs of mathematical systems. It’s much crazier than that. Wolfram claims that traditional methods of scientific analysis are needlessly vague and imprecise. Instead, he says, scientists can learn all that they need to know by searching for the precise sets of rules that govern the behavior they’re trying to observe and then reproducing them on the computer. Regular observation-based science can only yield statistical probabilities of outcomes. Nail the right ruleset, however, and you need only run the program a few million times in the computer and you will actually SEE what will happen — not with any kind of statistical analysis, but with your own eyes. All of the universe, Wolfram claims, is merely based on computations of this kind.

He then goes on to give examples of automata that can generate graphs that look curiously like spirals, or leaf forms, or trees, or what-have-you. And this is all well and good — you’ve probably seen such effects before, even if Wolfram claims he hasn’t, in fractal images. There’s even a software program called Painter that uses fractal-based computation to simulate natural art media, including oil painting, pastels, and watercolors.

But that’s just it: Painter is a simulation. Ask any artist whether the experience of using the oil-paint tools in Painter is the same as using actual oil paint, or if it yields the same results, and they will tell you no. The results might be effective enough to convince an observer that the picture was made with real oil paints, but it will only be an illusion. A real oil painting created by the same artist would look substantially different, because the model is imperfect.

But to Wolfram, who has spent the last 20 years sitting in front of his computer, an imperfect model only means that there must be a perfect model out there, waiting to be discovered. To Wolfram, who believes that all of the universe can be represented through computation, the model and the reality are the same thing. Instead of wasting their time with fruitless experimentation, Wolfram says — he’s quick to dismiss just about anybody else’s work as “fruitless” — scientists should sit down at their computers, like he has done, and start looking for the cellular automata-based patterns that unlock the keys to nature.

The idea that man can capture the essence of the universe in a simple calculation, like a genie in a bottle, is an attractive one — but in much the same way that the idea of a perpetual motion machine is attractive. It’s fun, it’s wistful, but it’s not very practical. (Oh wait — did I forget to mention that Wolfram claims to call into question the Second Law of Thermodynamics? p451: “Starting nearly a century ago it came to be widely believed that the Second Law is an almost universal principle. But in reality there is surprisingly little evidence for this.”)

The biggest problem with Wolfram’s automata is that they have virtually no predictive power — and so therefore are virtually useless to scientists. Suppose a scientist discovered an automata that, given a certain input, produced a pattern that looked remarkably like the coastline of Norway. What would it prove? What predictions could we make based on that? Could we know what Norway will look like a hundred, or eighteen billion years from now? Probably not, because as any geologist will tell you, what Norway looks like has precious little to do with what Norway IS. No wonder Wolfram advocates discarding all previous scientific method — since it has little use for his “experiments,” it must itself be useless.

“It has taken me the better part of twenty years to build the intellectual structure that is needed, but I have been amazed by the resuls,” Wolfram writes in the first chapter (if he does say so himself). “For what I have found is that with this new kind of science I have developed it suddenly becomes possible to make progress on a remarkable range of fundamental issues that have never successfully been addressed by any of the existing sciences before.”

Fine. Proof is in the pudding. What progress? What advances have been made based on this material? What science is it revolutionizing, and what great steps forward have humankind taken?

Ultimately, though it’s sad to say it, this book belongs nowhere other than the crank file, along with all the books on secret energy sources, ESP, and UFOs building the pyramids. I’ll never again be able to think of Stephen Wolfram without being reminded of that character in the movie Pi, being driven mad by all those numbers. Somewhere out there, even now, Stephen Wolfram is staring at page after page of graphical output from cellular automata programs — completely and irreversibly batshit insane.

Save yourself the same fate and don’t waste a minute on this overlong, repetitious, hollow, arrogant, self-aggrandizing, dishonest, tedious, intellectual dead-end of a text.

The novel opens with Brown, an overworked, sleep-deprived intern at “Manhattan’s worst hospital,” being mugged by a lone gunman. The mugger starts having second thoughts right away. Probably he should have known better than to try to rob someone with a bad attitude and a thorough knowledge of human anatomy. What he couldn’t possibly have known, however, is that Dr. Peter Brown is actually Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, former mob assassin, recently having completed medical school while enrolled in the federal witness protection program. As it turns out, what this mugger really needs isn’t money. He needs to go to the emergency room — he just doesn’t know it yet.

But Dr. Brown has a surprise waiting for him, too. A cancer patient at the hospital turns out to be an acquaintance from Brown’s former life, with ties to the mobsters who would surely kill him if they knew where to find him. With a phone call, the patient discloses Brown’s secret to an accomplice, with instructions to tip off the mobsters only in the event of his death. If the patient dies, so does Brown.

The plot unfolds from there, weaving present-day events with the lurid story of Brown’s past. We learn how he came involved with the mob and how he fell from grace, and about a series of increasingly dangerous and distasteful jobs in between. And in the present day, we watch as Brown tries to extricate himself from his predicament amid the chaos and insanity of a major metropolitan hospital.

Bazell’s style is pure pulp. This is not a book for anyone who’s bothered by profanity, and certainly not for anyone who can’t handle gallows humor. The sentences come fast and furious, everywhere punctuated by Brown’s dry sarcasm. This style is, of course, something of a crime-novel cliché; but Bazell, himself an intern at UCSF, manages to suffuse it with enough genuine style and wit — not to mention curious asides about the often-unpalatable world of modern medicine — to hold our attention. And where some crime novels are content to stick strictly to formula, offering only laconic banalities disguised as grim truths, Beat the Reaper never shies away from utter, wild-eyed absurdity, particularly in its pleasingly grotesque conclusion. Clever and occasionally hilarious, this is a novel that suggests that nothing in this world should really be taken seriously — not even life and death.

Beat the Reaper is a fast read — if you bring it on vacation, expect to finish it before you leave the plane — but if you enjoy it, know that Bazell has already promised us more of Dr. Brown’s adventures in future installments. I’m usually annoyed by this kind of thing. To me, it suggests a lazy author looking for commercial success, rather than one who is genuinely interested in good writing. But Beat the Reaper was entertaining enough that I may give the next one a try. If Bazell can keep up the pace and doesn’t run out of ideas, he could have an original and enjoyable series in the making.

You’ll find none of that in Daemon, the first novel by network security consultant Daniel Suarez. Daemon may be a genuine first: a techno-thriller firmly grounded in real-world technology. There’s no jabber about “mainframes” here, no “hacking systems” with pocket calculators. Suarez’ use of jargon, his understanding of the way computer systems operate, and his familiarity with information security practices are all pitch-perfect. If you thought we needed such a book, here it is. But did we?

I write about computers and the Internet every day. I write nonfiction for a technically literate audience, yet even I know that there are some things that just don’t need to be said. Getting the point across is more important than wowing the reader with your own technical savvy. So when Suarez writes dialogue like, “This one consists of a lengthy burst of packets from TCP port 135 at a predictable interval and bit length,” I have to wonder whether he’s really enlightening us or just, shall we say, padding the job.

But Suarez clearly knows his audience. His obsession with technical detail is pervasive, bordering on the fetishistic. Nearly every object in the story is identified by its make and model. It’s porn for the type of guys who envy other men’s golf clubs.

Some writers will tell you that a character drove to the office. Suarez, on the other hand, will tell you that the character stepped out of his house and entered his black 2008 BMW 760Li, inserted the key in the ignition, turned clockwise, causing the 12-cylinder engine to come to life with a pleasant roar, after which the driver threw the gear shift into reverse and applied level pressure to the accelerator for the journey to his office at the corner of 7th and Ventura. I’m not kidding; he’ll really tell you how many cylinders are in the engine.

This attention to detail only partly disguises the fact that Suarez’ writing is no great shakes. His sentences are rife with clichés. Lots of characters shake hands with “vicelike grips” (ouch!), chapters are titled things like “Cogs in the Machine” and “Powers That Be,” there’s a mysterious figure known only as “the Major.” Unnecessary adverbs litter the text, with characters rolling their eyes dramatically and pushing forcefully. The prose isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely more pulp than Pulitzer.

So, having said all that, you might get the impression that I didn’t like the book. But actually I did. As light entertainment it’s really not bad, and for a first-time author Suarez has acquitted himself admirably.

A lot of my enjoyment of the book has to do with the unexpected direction of the plot. You can pluck the short version from the cover copy: brilliant videogame designer Matthew Sobol has died, but his legacy is a malevolent computer program — a daemon, in PC parlance — that has infiltrated the world’s information systems and is steadily growing in power such that it will soon threaten society itself. What’s refreshing, however, is that about halfway through the book Suarez drops the trappings of a typical techno-thriller, with its police procedures and technical mumbo-jumbo, and the story starts turning into something else.

Without spoiling too much, I’ll just say that by the end, this book resembles The Stand more than The Bourne Identity, and it’s a direction I didn’t anticipate. What I maybe should have anticipated is that the ending leaves it wide-open for a sequel, maybe even a series. Well, hey; I did say it worked mainly as light entertainment.

Some of the ideas in Daemon are downright goofy. For example, among its other tools of destruction, the evil computer program battles our human protagonists with a fleet of menacing robot cars. Say what you want, but cars that drive themselves have never been scary, have never been anything but silly, not in Christine nor anywhere else. And when the daemon begins marshaling its resources, it outfits its human agents with high-tech gear straight out of a William Gibson novel. How a videogame programmer was able to write a computer program that was capable of inventing and building technology beyond the capabilities of any human engineer is never explained.

But other ideas are more interesting. Suarez’ vision of a possible global apocalypse is intriguing, and it has a strange, almost philosophical undertone — like a Left Behind novel as penned by a libertarian capitalist. It’s almost as if he has some kind of message he’s trying to get across, but if he does it’s not immediately clear. Fortunately, Daemon works just fine as a beach novel, and Suarez will have ample time to flesh out his ideas when the sequel, Freedom™, is released next year. Check out Suarez’ Web site at thedaemon.com for more info.

Eric is the quintessential disaffected New York thirtysomething. He fancies himself a screenwriter, but the only thing he has going is a work-for-hire project that he knows is crap. In real life he manages a hipster bar for his money, which he spends on an apartment that he shares with a girlfriend who may or may not be coming back from an overseas research trip for her master’s thesis on fringe sexuality. Each day makes Eric more aware of the rut into which he’s sunk, as he watches disaffected New Yorkers a decade his junior landing the breaks he feels he deserves. And to make matters worse, one of his coworkers has just been shot, and Eric is the only witness. Or is he the only suspect?

That’s the setup for what feels like less a crime novel than a snapshot of urban life in the 21st century. This is my first novel by Price (his most famous being Clockers), but I know his work as one of the writers for the excellent HBO series The Wire. If you like The Wire, there’s a fair chance you’ll like this. Price successfully transfers the grit and crackle of that show’s dialogue to the printed page, and he spares the reader none of The Wire’s world-weary pessimism about social institutions.

In fact, this book pushes the envelope of The Wire’s criticism of police departments, to the point that you’re almost forced to the conclusion that cops are irredeemably corrupt, bungling incompetents. Having grown up in a suburb full of bored cops I can certainly empathize with this point of view, but I can’t say that the emotions inspired by Price’s portrait of police ineptitude made me feel very good.

And that’s the thing. For all its bile, The Wire is buoyed by the sense that its creators are actually engaged in some kind of quixotic bid for social change. There’s a humanistic element in the show — not redemptive, exactly, but a quality that’s strangely uplifting. I can’t say the same about Lush Life. It’s hardly a tragedy, but it leaves us off pretty much where we got on. What are we to make of that? Is it enough for a novel to offer us a goldfish-bowl view of modern life and say, “That’s the way it is, folks!” Who is the intended audience of this book, and what are they meant to take away from it?

The copy I borrowed from the library may offer a clue. A past reader saw fit to decorate the margins of the early pages with little handwritten notes — in pencil, presumably so it can’t be said that he or she is actually defacing the book — offering commentary for subsequent readers. “Price’s dialogue is delicious,” reads one, “but you have be high IQ [sic] or an intellectual to talk like this. Really!” (Don’t we all know it.) Another explains, “I don’t think one would notice what’s going on on the other side of the street,” while a third advises, “Witnesses are notoriously unreliable!”

Yeah. I guess years of watching CSI has made our commentator an expert on police procedure, not to mention second-guessing what might happen after page 74. Is this the audience for books like this — smug, middle-class white people who like to read stories about crime and urban blight so they can seem worldly and street-smart at parties? People whose narcissistic scribbles trail off after page 100, so we never find out if they even finished the book?

I have a nagging suspicion that the answer is yes. Price doesn’t strike me as any kind of true urban insider. His hamfisted attempts at rap lyrics — one of his characters likes to “write beats” in a notebook — are so sad that it’s obvious he’s never listened to a minute of hip-hop in his life. From his photo on the inside back cover I’d peg him for a Steely Dan man, or maybe Stevie Ray Vaughan: blue music for white people whose tragic ennui transports them to the darkest corners of the neighborhoods where they dwell in their sullen souls — just not in real life, because they have too much money for that.

Lush Life is an entertaining read, and Price is one hell of a wordsmith, but it feels somehow empty. When it’s all over we’re left with little choice but to just take it as read. If you agree with Price’s point of view, you’ll feel satisfied. If you don’t, then you’ll take it like all the other unfathomable people and situations you pass on the street every day, and just move on.

Turns out it is and it isn’t. It’s true that Snuff, the new novel, is set in the world of hardcore gonzo pornography, and that Palahniuk has obviously done his usual meticulous job of digging for trivia and fast-facts that will leave you scratching your head and wondering if he’s putting you on. Beyond that basic high concept, however, seekers of cult vile transgressiveness could probably ask for more.

The basic premise is this: Porn queen Cassie Wright wants to break a record. She wants to be the first woman in history to perform 600 sex acts with 600 different men in one sitting. The story opens with the 600 assembled and waiting for their curtain call, and it’s narrated from the perspective of three or four key players. But there’s a catch. It seems nobody actually believes that Cassie can actually complete this feat and live — including Cassie herself.

Chuck is still Chuck, of course, and so he paints his porn set not as a steamy, erotic underworld but as a sordid, unsanitary pit soaked with sweat, semen, urine, and the old-feet stench of unwashed body parts. His porn stars are aging, sagging, and stained with fake tanning solution; his eager amateurs are basement-dwelling trolls in stained underpants, hopped up on so much Viagra that the veins in their eyeballs are ready to burst.

Beyond this mildewed setting, however, it’s hard to see what Palahniuk is trying to say. Maybe there’s something about the nature of families in here. Maybe there’s something about the inherent hollowness of the pornography business. Almost, but not really.

Unfortunately, after a far more daring turn in Rant, Palahniuk seems to have fallen back on his tried-and-true formula for this one: Assemble the 3×5 cards full of trivia, cookie-cut a few characters, work that famous voice up to full speed, and let the novel write itself. At least at 197 pages you’re never asked to bear with it long enough to feel cheated. But it’s no more satisfying than eating a bag of Doritos and no more illuminating than reading the empty bag afterward.

There’s nobody else who does what Chuck Palahniuk does. Anyone who tried would be called on the carpet as a faker right away. It’s just a pity that after 11 novels he can’t seem to muster the ambition to take a chance on a new direction. Rant seemed like a good start, but Snuff feels like Survivor all over again.

One thing Palahniuk’s cult-novelist status does seem to have earned him, however, is some impressive book design. The hardcover of Snuff, as designed by Michael Collica, is a slick package. The typography, the foil embossing, the endpapers, even the choice of brown ink instead of black for the text are all nice touches. As an object, this book is as pretty as a designer wine glass. Too bad it’s half empty.

That much we know. The actual fate of the 130-odd men on that doomed expedition will forever remain a mystery. But where history leaves off, Dan Simmons’ novel The Terror picks up the tale, giving a fictionalized account of what might have happened to Captains Franklin and Crozier and their crews as they weathered the next three years trapped in the Arctic ice.

The result is a harrowing story of slow death and creeping despair, as the expedition gradually succumbs to cold, hunger, thirst, frostbite, sunburn, scurvy, fatigue, accidents, spoiled food, isolation, and their own encroaching madness. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, as Simmons has it, they must also contend with a mysterious creature on the ice that seems Hell-bent on slaughtering them to the last man.

Simmons blends the horror and historical genres with the deftness of a expert storyteller. At 766 pages this is a big book, but it’s a taut and gripping one that keeps the reader moving relentlessly toward its conclusion. So skillful is Simmons at relating the human tragedy of his tale, in fact, that I’m left to wonder why he found it necessary to include the supernatural horror elements at all.

Simmons’ meticulous research is what makes this book work. The acknowledgements at the back list three pages of sources, and the attention to detail shows. Everything about 19th-century naval life, from the uniforms and armaments, to the customs and practices of the service, to the coal-burning stove that works ’round-the-clock to bake biscuits for the crew’s meals, rings with accuracy.

No detail is glossed over or taken for granted. Simmons’ descriptions of “man-hauling” sledges loaded with supplies and sick crewmen across the treacherous ice in the fog and freezing sleet will have you bundling up under the covers, and his account of one crewman’s death from what could only be botulism — although no 19th-century surgeon would recognize it as such — is truly horrifying.

Simmons also has a keen sense of the culture and climate of Victorian England. Indeed, too often it is the men’s own stubborn Britishness that undermines their hopes for survival. For example, Captain Crozier forbids his crew from wearing the skins of slain animals because it seems to him like “heathen totemism.” As a result, they must fight to keep warm beneath layers of sodden, frozen wool. And when a group of Marines encounters an Inuit hunting party on the ice, they see the natives’ weapons and immediately open fire on the “savages” — thus alienating the expedition from the only people who might have helped them replenish their dwindling food supply.

Amid all this, I have to wonder why Simmons chose to include the creature the crew comes to call the Terror — a huge, bearlike beast that can seemingly appear at will, is completely impervious to attack, and is possessed of a cold and murderous intelligence with no other aim than to rip the crew to ribbons at every opportunity.

Compared to the very real horrors the expedition must face, this mythical monster seems out of place. If anything, it only cheapens the survival-horror aspect of the story. If an impossible creature is fair play, then anything can happen. Who knows? The expedition could be teleported to safety at any moment. For every sudden death-by-monster, a crewman could just as easily have fallen through the ice, or broken a leg at the hip, or been hit by accidental gunfire — so why this choice? Did commercial pressures convince Simmons that he couldn’t deliver a strict historical novel, or was it a simple lack of confidence?

Don’t get me wrong. The Terror was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I recommend it. The scenes with the monster do allow Simmons to inject some action into what otherwise might have been a slow, sad story of men starving to death, and in the end the monster does serve another purpose for Simmons’ plot. I’m just not convinced it was a satisfying one.

Simmons’s previous works have included the science fiction novels Hyperion and Ilium, and I think his propensity for the fantastic would have been better left to those types of projects. With The Terror he demonstrates his potential to become a powerful new voice in historical fiction. Here’s hoping that his upcoming novel, Drood – a fictionalized account of the last years of Charles Dickens — has the guts to offer its subject matter at face value.

OK, so let’s see … best read of the last 25 years?

1.) The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.
OK, well, 25 years makes for an awfully crowded field, but I did enjoy this book thoroughly. Off to a decent start. Let’s see what else they’ve got, shall we? Just a few picks, at random…

2.) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling
Ah yes, another literary triumph. Not quite as good as The Road, mind you, but almost. And clearly, someone’s thought carefully about this. Note that they didn’t just drone on and on, naming all the Harry Potter books one after the other. No, they chose to focus on the one book in the series that’s actually any good. Which happens to be the fourth one (the one in the middle).

16.) The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
17.) Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
Hmmm, these rankings aren’t that good. But what could they really expect? They were competing against Harry Potter. And The Watchmen, which has pictures. Bonus points for Handmaid, though; at least they made a movie out of that.

21.) On Writing, Stephen King
Shame on Stephen King. Since 1983 he’s written Christine, Pet Sematary, It, Misery, most of the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne, The Green Mile, Hearts in Atlantis, and countless others, but damn him, not one of those books can compare to a 288-page memoir he wrote about what it’s like to be a fiction writer. In fact, I’m surprised he even claims to know what it’s like. And even this book, in the end, lost out to Bridget Jones’s Diary.

40.) His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Because, let’s face it, Martin Amis is just too potty-mouthed to take the #40 spot. And The Kite Runner is about Afghanistan, and you know how we feel about those people.

71.) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Ann Fadiman
A book about the American healthcare system and a culture clash between Western doctors and an ethnic minority that fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War? Interesting choice. Frankly I’m surprised that frivolous stuff like this even made the list. You can see why it rates 25 lower than Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

80.) Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney
Take that, Bret Easton Ellis! McInerney rates, but you get zip.

87.) The Ruins, Scott Smith
Now there’s real talent for you! Who else but Scott Smith could publish his second book ever — a short horror novel about bloodsucking plants — get it made into a B-movie, then still make the list above Annie Proulx (who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1994)? Way to go, Scott!

96.) The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
Boo, Dan Brown! See how we hate you? We’re so tired of hearing your name — and reading and re-reading all your books on airplane flights — that we only rated you #96 on the list of the greatest classics of our age. That, and Tom Hanks’s hair looked really weird in the movie.

For the sarcasm impaired: Get yourself a library card and go read some real books, already.

BTW, for the record, I’ve read 18 out of the 100. Looks like I’ve got some culturin’ to do.

More than the text, however, the real treat of Kirby: King of Comics is the lavish presentation of Kirby’s art. Never before have I seen comic book art reproduced so faithfully (and if anyone deserves such treatment it surely is Kirby). In fact, when I first peeked inside the book’s covers, I literally gasped.

Where other art books offer simple halftone reproductions of comic art, this one pulls out all the stops. Wherever possible, Kirby’s artwork has been reproduced from the original pages, and a rich, high-fidelity color process has been used throughout — even for black and white originals.

The results are stunning. Pencil marks and under-drawing are indistinct, but visible. The black lines appear as the inker laid them, full of tonal variations and clear brush strokes. Here and there the ink has faded to brown from light damage, or a piece of yellowed transparent tape can be seen. Still other drawings have obvious corrections made in white gouache. As the introduction by Neil Gaiman suggests, this incredible reproduction is truly the next best thing to standing in front of a Kirby original in a museum.

The book covers the span of Kirby’s career, from early, crude newspaper strips and advertising illustrations, to his last regular comics work for the independent publishers of the 80s. The works on display range from pencil roughs, to fully-inked, double-page spreads, to elaborately rendered watercolor presentation drawings. Many of them are marvels to behold (no pun intended).

I confess I never really “got” Kirby as a kid. By the late 1970s, when I was reading comics, artists like John Buscema and Neal Adams had arrived, bringing to comics a slick realism borrowed from the world of commercial illustration. Kirby comics would keep cropping up, and I’d be baffled: Who was this guy who seemingly couldn’t get his head out of 1961, with his weird, blocky anatomy and his ugly faces? Why did they keep hiring him?

It wasn’t until much later that I could fully appreciate Kirby’s genius — his dynamism, his effortless composition, his rich, pleasing use of contrast, his near-endless creativity. Sure, some of his ideas really were pretty hokey; it’s hard to see how kids raised on the X-Men could fall for a gang of teenage hippie-heroes called the Forever People. But had a book like Kirby: King of Comics existed back then, I could at least have appreciated the raw, unadulterated talent of the man.

As for the text, well, it is what it is. If you want a thorough account of Kirby’s life and career, from humble beginnings to accolades late in life, you got it. If you want to talk about whether Stan Lee or Jack Kirby deserves more credit for inventing Marvel’s most memorable characters, or debate the finer points of Kirby’s contractual disputes, you’ll have to look elsewhere. This book makes no effort to criticize much of anything Kirby did, opting instead for a generous, even obsequious tone throughout.

But much of that stuff is lost to history, anyway. The only person who could answer your questions would be Stan Lee, and he’s the first to admit his memory isn’t what it was. What remains are the art and the stories — and I doubt you’ll find a better representation of those than this book.

I give this one my highest recommendation. My only gripe is that, at 224 pages, it could have used a couple hundred more.

This is a fine enough idea, but unfortunately Gibson’s execution lacks whatever spark might make it work in practice. His own personal zeitgeist is just a little too eager, a little too agog with the possibilities of modern technology for my tastes. He has a bad habit of repeating himself, going over and over the same old ideas. And worst of all, in the case of Spook Country, he’s not above delivering a dull, flat little book.

Readers heaped praise on Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s last novel, and indeed it was all right enough. Nobody seemed to notice, though, that the main plot device — a search for the origin of some mysterious art — was the same one Gibson used in Count Zero.

Spook Country doesn’t borrow so blatantly from Gibson’s back catalog, but it doesn’t tread a lot of new ground, either. The only prominent piece of not-invented-yet technology is, you guessed it, a helmet that lets the wearer visualize digital graphics in 3-D space. Among the characters, you’ve got your mysterious ex-government combat agent types. Some of them seem to channel voodoo loa as a form of meditation (Count Zero again). Just as Pattern Recognition’s protagonist was named Cayce (rhymes with Case, a character from Neuromancer), here we meet a homeless hacker named Bobby — a name Gibson used for characters in Burning Chrome and Count Zero, both. Hollis Henry, our heroine, may not have mirrored lenses implanted into her eyes, but she is a former rock musician. This in turn gives her a reason to be hanging out with characters with clever names like Inchmale and Odile.

It’s as if Gibson wants to mine all his best ideas from his Neuromancer trilogy notebooks, only then paint them over with a veneer of banal modernity, to make them seem less “scifi” and more “modern and relevant.” And it doesn’t work. What we’re left with is a dull mishmash, full to bursting with ideas that go nowhere and plots threads that deliver nothing.

In Pattern Recognition, Cayce was literally allergic to branding. This was an interesting idea: What are we to make of it? But Gibson just acted as if it was a perfectly normal allergy for someone to have. Instead of using it as a plot device, he just tossed it into the mix and kept going. Similarly, in Spook Country Gibson posits an entire subculture dedicated to creating 3-D artwork in virtual spaces that can only be viewed with the magic helmets, but this also has little if anything to do with the plot. Toss and go.

Gibson’s characters are nothing if not cool, but in Spook Country they seem to have been boiled down to their final essence, so cool that they’re practically faceless. Among all the characters in the three different plot threads Gibson tangles together, only Hollis Henry seems to have any kind of recognizable inner life. What’s more, Gibson wants to keep the outcome of the plot a secret, so the reader is incapable of fathoming the characters’ motivations.

As for that plot, much of it remains a mystery even after finishing the book. We are told, at last, what the characters are doing. It’s left for us to puzzle out why they should bother. Without giving too much away, it has something to do with Iraq war profiteering — something. We’re never really told what.

It’s all so terribly serious. And yet, I found I couldn’t take it seriously. The whole thing is a little bit like being a spectator of a Victorian intrigue, seen from the vantage point of the court furniture maker. Not only are you not privy to the details, but you half suspect you wouldn’t even be interested.

From Sickboy’s mouth to God’s ear, courtesy the pen of Mr. Irvine Welsh. And with his latest scribblings, Welsh completes the circle. Sickboy’s Unifying Theory of Life: Beautifully fucking illustrated, in the form of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work.

It’s difficult to tell if this collection is an attempt to cash in, an attempt to cash out, or just a bunch of failed experiments. One thing is certain, however: It’s far from Welsh’s best (a spot that I might reserve for Porno, though Glue is definitely in the running).

The first piece is Welsh with his “transgressive” knob dialed up to 11, its central plot element being a man who gets bit on the penis by a rattlesnake. True to this puerile genre of story, his best male friend offers to suck the poison out. Throw in a few descriptions of masturbation (clandestine and otherwise), some references to Burning Man, and forced homosexual fellatio at gunpoint, and … well, that’s pretty much it. It there was any point to it beyond a schoolboy snicker, it was lost on me.

Next up is another amusing — but mostly irrelevant — tale of British lower-class boys behaving badly abroad, in this case on a Spanish island. Our hero must juggle his drink, his “birds,” and his precarious grip on respectability. Again; that’s about it.

“The DOGS of Lincoln Park” brings Welsh Stateside to visit with some stuck-up girls in Chicago. He paints a pretty good picture of some thoroughly unlikeable women, then throws in a possible love interest in the form of a chef at an Asian restaurant. Apparently Welsh doesn’t realize that Asians are perhaps not as exotic to Americans as they are to Scots, because he wastes no time in trotting out all the old stereotypes: How are Koreans different from Chinese, really? Do they or do they not eat dogs? Do they have small penises? If one got me alone, would he kill me? Thankfully Welsh decides the last three in the negative, and we are left with yet another sketch that seems pointless to anyone who has more than a tourist’s-eye view of the U.S.

Unfortunately, Welsh compounds his mistake by offering up another story based in the States. This one follows a filmmaker, a refugee from the Hollywood scene who was raised in Texas — a fact that is apparently meant to explain why he constantly talks like a cowboy from a Pace Picante Sauce commercial. Some sample dialogue:

It was midday and the sun was at its cruelest and even an ol Texan boy like myself, living in LA til fairly recently, could sometimes forget how fierce it could be. Out there the bastard baked all the freshness out of the air, leavin it feelin like particles of iron in your lungs. As your throat seared your respiratory system started bangin and you sweated like a solitary truck-stop hooker gaspin goodbye as the last lusty buck in that convoy pulled on his dirty ol jeans.

Git a rope.

The plot isn’t much better, and it ends on a contrivance that would make the hacks who cranked out the stories for Tales from the Crypt comics groan.

It’s only the last story in the collection that redeems it, a novella called “Kingdom of Fife.” It’s no coincidence, either, that the only really worthwhile piece in the bunch brings Welsh back to his native Scotland. “Kingdom of Fife” proves that Welsh’s use of Scots dialect is more than just for show. He succeeds at it because it is here, on the grimy streets of Scottish cities, that he is truly “writing what he knows.”

The same tricks don’t work when he tries to portray American characters, because Welsh is decidedly not an American. He does appear to be Scottish through and through, however, and his curious characters (entirely new in this case, with no guest appearances from the Trainspotting gang) ring true here just as they have in earlier works. And the story itself is not bad. Nothing really to write home about, but an an enjoyable enough read.

So maybe I was too harsh there at first. If You Liked Work, You’ll Love School isn’t necessarily proof that Sickboy’s Unifying Theory has come home to roost in Welsh himself. It does illustrate the potential for a slide, however, and after the lackluster effort with Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs I was hoping Welsh would try a little harder.

Hopefully the fragments on display here are just that: Random pieces that Welsh was working on and almost discarded, only to rapidly rework into a form that would be worthy of publication here. Hopefully with his next work he’ll come back and deliver the goods.